Research Paper (Argumentative) – Cannabis should be federaly legalized or decriminalized.

Must be written in 3rd person. Will provide 10 researched sources (file server is currently down on this site) and 6 page research approach already submitted and approved.

INSTRUCTIONS
Academic Research Paper
The paper should be between 25-40 double-spaced pages in APA or MLA format. Your final submission must include the following:

Title Page
Abstract
Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures (if applicable)
Introduction
Research Strategies
A Review of the Literature
Discussions and Conclusions
Annotated Bibliography (All sources referenced in the paper should be listed and annotated in the bibliography.)
Appendices (if applicable)

Current Thesis:
While Cannabis is considered a gateway drug by many, there are many benefits legalizing cannabis in America because Cannabis has many uses in the medical industry, legalization will greatly reduce the over-stressed legal system, and increased tax revenue from sales of Cannabis can be used to relieve other tax burdens.

Intro para:
Cannabis has been used in medicinal religious practices for over 5,000 years across the globe. However, only in the last 100 years did it become demonized by governments. Specifically, in the United States of America in the early 1900s a campaign began to make cannabis illegal. This campaign was fueled by racism, bad science, and emotional biases. Marijuana (as the indigenous Mexican population referred to cannabis) was widely used as a relaxant and in religious ceremonies. The growing disdain by Americans in the southwestern states (circa the 1910s) for the Mexican population began to target cannabis as a cause for a crime.
“Mexican immigrants referred to this plant as ‘marihuana’. While Americans were very familiar with ‘cannabis’ because it was present in almost all tinctures and medicines available at the time, the word ‘marihuana’ was a foreign term. So, when the media began to play on the fears that the public had about these new citizens by falsely spreading claims about the ‘disruptive Mexicans’ with their dangerous native behaviors including marihuana use, the rest of the nation did not know that this ‘marihuana’ was a plant they already had in their medicine cabinets.” (Burnett, 2014)
In the 1930s the smear campaign against campaign grew and began to target other minorities, specifically black Americans. During this time, the movie Refer Madness came out and claimed that marijuana caused white women to have sex with black men, at the time a very taboo concept. Later in 1972, the Schafer Commission submitted their report to President Nixon that negated the claims of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act (declared unconstitutional in 1969) that was replaced in 1970 with the Controlled Substance Act. The Schafer Commission recommended that Cannabis be decriminalized. However, Nixon threw out the report and ignored the evidence, and shortly after what is now known as the War on Drugs (coined under the Regan Administration) began. Propaganda has been used by the pharmaceutical, tobacco, alcohol, and paper industry over the last 100 years to program the American citizen to only see the negatives of cannabis. Currently, 11 States fully legalized cannabis, 33 States allow medical cannabis use, 16 States have decriminalized cannabis, and the Hemp Farming Act of 2018 removed this form of cannabis from the schedule 1 list legalizing it as an ordinary agricultural commodity. Even with all this movement at the state and local level, possession of cannabis is still a federal crime – even in states that have legalized it.